What is TRON?

The definitive summary of TRON and TRX

Story Highlights

TRON's purpose

TRON's features

The 6 phases of TRON

The TRON team

TRX token history

Buying TRX

Storing TRX

The terms TRON and Tronix (TRX) are often used interchangeably although they technically refer to different things. Tronix (TRX) is the official token (crypto-currency) of TRON, which refers to the actual platform and technology. The purpose of TRON put simply is to take steps towards decentralizing the internet, which means that individual users would be able to own, store, distribute and sell their own data instead of relying on centralized entities such as Facebook and Google. It plans to achieve this by creating a “blockchain-based decentralized protocol that aims to construct a worldwide free content entertainment system”.

TRON’s team members associate themselves with the vision of the internet’s founder, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and “are convinced that protocol, from the moment of its invention, is an asset for human beings, rather than a profit-making tool for small groups.”

Once it is fully operative, TRON’s decentralized platform would allow online creators to create, store and sell their own content without the need for intermediary companies.

It can thus be said that TRON has emancipatory, disruptive and revolutionary aspirations.

TRON’s unique features

TRON’s decentralized ambition distinguishes itself from the centralized internet in four aspects. Taken from the TRON website, they are as follows:

Data liberation: on a free and uncontrolled basis, the contents including characters, pictures, audios and videos may be unloaded, stored and spread.

Content enabling: digital assets are obtained through provision and spread of contents, thus economically stimulating the enabling of content ecology.

Personal ICO: an individual may freely distribute digital assets in the form of ICO, while others may enjoy the benefits and services brought due to the continuous development of data contributors by purchasing digital assets.

Infrastructure: with distributed digital assets will be equipped with a complete set of decentralized infrastructures, including distributed exchange, autonomous gaming, forecast and game system.

The 6 phases of TRON

To achieve their goals, TRON has set out a long term road-map consisting of 6 phases namely, Exodus, Odyssey, Great Voyage, Apollo, Star Trek and Eternity.

Exodus is the current phase we are in. During this phase, on the basis of the distributed storage technology, TRON will provide users with a completely free and reliable platform for data publication, storage and dissemination.

Odyssey, the next stage, will focus on incentivizing participation in the new platform. "Economic incentives, empowerment, content ecology and block chain technology will create a fully competitive economic mechanism with fair returns for content creation, distribution and dissemination."

TRON's third phase places focus on initiating individual ICO's. "TRON solves three major issues: income measurement, dividend payment and management of supporters, and achieves significant transformation from the "fan economy" to the "fan finance"."

"Free Movement of Value—De-centralized Token Trading Exclusively for Individuals. To reach the goal that each content producer in the TRON system can issue their own tokens, the system must have a complete solution for de-centralized tradings. "

Eternity, the final stage, sees a growing community able to monetize and fund-raise. "...developers can... achieve crowd-funding for game development, and make it possible for common investors to invest in games."

The TRON team

Something that has stood out with Tron from the outset when compared to other blockchain ICO’s is its number of well-known and high profile initial investors as well as the high caliber nature of its technical team.

The high profile of the individuals who make up TRON’s team has inspired confidence in its ICO investors and TRX token holders even during periods of the TRX token price dropping which has occurred largely due to market factors that have affected all crypto-currencies as opposed to any perceived deficiencies in the TRON project itself.

TRON CEO and founder, Justin Sun, is already something of a business world celebrity. Having become well known for his daily tweets and his often youthful yet transparent way of conveying progress updates to the TRON community, he holds an impressive resume. A protege of Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Justin was featured in the 2015 Forbes China 30 under 30 list as well as the 2017 Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the founder of Peiwo (the Chinese version of Snapchat) and was also the former chief representative of Ripple China.

Team TRON also includes a number of former employees of some of China’s internet giants. These include CTO Lucien Chen, a former Alibaba and Tencent employee and Edison Wu, a former senior technical engineer at Baidu.

TRON’s Chinese backers include notable businessmen such as Dai Wei, the CEO of OFO bike, Binshen Tang, the founder of Clash of Kings and Hitters Xu, the founder of Nebulas.

Lucien Chen has served in many big companies such as Netease, Tencent and Alibaba

Jihan Wu

Jihan is co-founder BITMAIN, one of the most well-known bitcoin companies

Hitters Xu

Founder of Nebulas & ico365

Wei Dai

Founder of ofo, the biggest shared bicycles provider in China

Edison Wu

Former Baidu senior technical engineer

TRX Token History

TRX was launched in August of 2017 as the official currency of the TRON platform. TRX currently has a circulating supply of 65 Billion + with a total supply of 100 Billion tokens. The TRON Foundation has locked up the remaining 34.2 billion tokens until January of 2020.

Since its launch, the value of one TRX token has shot up from approximately USD 0.002 to a high of approximately USD 0.30 on the 5th of January 2018, before falling and wavering around the USD 0.04 mark.

Buying TRX

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Unlike Bitcoin, TRX cannot be mined and must be purchased. This is usually done by users first buying Bitcoin or Ethereum directly from their credit cards on websites such as Coinbase.com or Luno.com and then transferring the newly bought Bitcoin or Ethereum to a wallet on a website that allows you to exchange your BTC or ETH for TRX. The most popular exchange by far among the TRON community for purchasing TRX is Binance.com

Storing TRX

TRX can be stored on a Ledger Nano S hardware wallet although feedback we received from members of the TRX community shows that most holders are comfortable with storing it on Binance at least until TRON releases their own wallet which is scheduled for the second quarter of 2018.